Ultrasound Contrast Microbubbles Reconstruction Using a Joint Enhanced Mean-to-Standard-Deviation Factor and Minimum Variance Beamformer

Abstract

Super-resolution ultrasound imaging (SRUI) is based on localizing the injected contrast microbubbles (MBs) and tracking of their displacement to achieve spatial resolution beyond the acoustic diffraction limit, thus being a promising approach for diagnosing microvascular-related diseases. Adaptive beamforming methods have been proven to effectively increase the number of detected MBs and improve the localization accuracy. In this study, we propose a joint enhanced mean-to-standard-deviation factor and minimum variance (EMSF-MV) beamformer to improve the resolution of MBs and suppress noise and clutter in echoes. Simulation and experimental results show that EMSF-MV improves the lateral full-width at half-maximum by more than 40% and suppresses the peak sidelobe level by more than 70%, compared with MV. The proposed method has the potential to increase the number of isolated MB scatterers and improve the localization accuracy for SRUI.